poem.exe

What is poem.exe?

poem.exe is a
bot
which generates haiku-like poems and publishes them to social media.

a good world
completely unaware
of years past

It uses an Oulipo technique based on Raymond Queneau’s
A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Verses are selected at
random from a corpus, and a single line is taken from each one to
produce a new poem. Some words may be randomly substituted for related
words (e.g. ‘cat’ may become ‘dog’). After assembling a poem in
this way, the program looks for seasonal references and uses these to
decide whether to publish or reject the poem.

The bulk of the corpus that it reads from consists of English
translations of haiku by Kobayashi Issa; as a result, many of the poems
are coloured by Issa’s personality, in particular his fondness for
snails.

How was it made?

A corpus of 600+ haiku and short verses,
selected by hand and modified to fit the constraints of the
project. This is updated from time to time.

Code to compile the corpus into a form more
easily readable by computers.

Code to read the corpus and assemble new
poems.

A server which is rented for running the code,
so that poems may be assembled without supervision throughout the
day.

Social media accounts to publish the poems
immediately as they are assembled.

View the source code on
GitHub.
The code is primarily written in Ruby; some parts are written in
Python. The comments in the poem.rb file contain more details on
how a poem is assembled.

Who made it?

poem.exe was made by
Liam Cooke,
an Irish software developer living in Melbourne, Australia.

Who's talking about it?

It’s minimalist, almost peaceful, sometimes hilarious, sometimes
sad. I think the success of bots like this one and
the Ephemerides
lies in the fact that people do actually love poetry (all appearances
to the contrary) — we are all so hungry for linguistic serendipity and
new meaning and words that behave in unexpected ways. Poetry like this
activates parts of the brain often left dormant.

The pieces produced by @poem_exe are ever-changing vessels for
meaning. Structurally, they resemble the more universally-familiar
haiku, and their imagery contains notions that are at once staccato and
trailing off. The result is a sense of unknowability, a magic that
cannot be revealed; the meaning belonging to the user and the user
alone.